Article EJPT

European Journal of Political Theory

2016, Vol. 15(4) 424–444
Redefining ‘tradition’ ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885116666795
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Humeira Iqtidar
King’s College London, UK

Abstract
Debates about preserving, modifying and applying sharia (Islamic normative guidelines)
through principles of taqlid (to follow) or ijtihad (to carry out independent interpret-
ation) are immensely useful in thinking through a sharper definition of tradition for
political theorists and historians of political thought more generally. Political theorists
and historians of political thought have tended to use tradition in a range of ways
without specifying key elements of the concept. Building on debates in Islamic thought
related to taqlid and its relationship to ijtihad, and through a focus on the ideas of a
contemporary thinker, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, this paper proposes that tradition in
political thought can be defined as a framework for knowledge production and con-
sumption constituted of two key elements: method and sensibility. Further, the paper
suggests that this definition allows us a better understanding of vibrancy in a tradition:
vehement debate, contradictions and internal contestation are not signs of decay but of
vitality within a tradition. It is the severe delinking of the two elements of a tradition,
method and sensibility, which has greater potential to reduce its vibrancy.

Keywords
Islamic political thought, Taqlid, Ghamidi, comparative political theory, South Asian
thought

Introduction
While the term tradition is widely used by political theorists and historians
of political thought, its key components remain under-conceptualised. From
Arendt’s (2002) subtle discussion of Marx’s place within the tradition of Western
political thought, to Pocock’s (2003) interest in tracing the influence of
Machiavelli’s ideas on Anglo-American republicanism, to Runciman’s (2001)
insightful analysis of the methodological arguments within the field of the history
of political thought, few have stopped to define precisely what they mean by trad-
ition, assuming it to be a self-explanatory term. Alasdair MacIntyre (1981, 1990)

Corresponding author:
Humeira Iqtidar, King’s College London, The Strand Campus, London WC2R 2LS, UK.
Email: humeira.iqtidar@kcl.ac.uk

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Iqtidar 425

one of the key figures in Anglo-American philosophy who has taken the idea of
tradition seriously, provides us very good reasons for thinking about traditions,
about how fragmented lineages may still carry force, and most critically, how
critics of a tradition might hope to make their arguments meaningful to its adher-
ents. Yet, he too neglects to define tradition concretely. Thus, tradition has been
used rather broadly to mean a range of things including the longevity of particular
ideas, the lineage of modes of thinking and the provenance of ideas.
Curiously, these notions undergo a transformation when we turn to Euro-
American academic study of Islam. Here, the concept of tradition has been used
in an entirely different way by placing it in tension with modernity and reform.
In this case, it becomes an entirely historical and normative concept. Rather than
using a differently inflected meaning of tradition when engaging with Islamic
thought, I suggest that debates within Islamic political thought provide important
conceptual means for defining tradition more concretely for political theorists and
historians of political thought: tradition may be best defined as a framework of
knowledge production and consumption comprised of two main elements: method,
i.e. a particular way of doing things, making arguments, using resources, organis-
ing thought, interpreting texts, as well as performing rituals or practices; and a
sensibility, i.e. a philosophical approach as well as the particular subjectivities tied
to that philosophy. This definition builds on the debates about taqlid (to follow)
and its relationship to ijtihad (to carry out independent interpretation) in Islamic
thought that I shall detail in the first section. Many revivalists and orientalists have
argued against taqlid, viewing it primarily as a set of rituals and practices that
Muslims have followed unthinkingly for centuries. They have advocated greater
reliance on ijtihad to liberate the ‘spirit’ of Islam from the deadweight of outdated
rituals, as well as from methodological norms of working within the defined
schools of sharia1 interpretation for moral guidance that are key to the practice
of taqlid. I go on to examine the thought of a popular and influential public intel-
lectual, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi, and some of the debates generated by his ideas.
Unlike a previous generation of Muslim modernists, Ghamidi has privileged a
dramatic emphasis on method in his attempt at reinvigorating the Islamic tradition
by establishing strict criteria for interpreting sharia that include a significant dis-
dain for earlier interpretive works. Through a focus on his thought and building on
the discussion on taqlid, I argue that vibrancy within a tradition is generated
through a constant calibration of method and sensibility. When and if the
matter is settled too dramatically in favour of one or the other, or if method is
separated markedly from the sensibility, then we can expect a reduction of debate
and hence vibrancy within the tradition. Ghamidi’s emphasis on a strict method for
interpreting the Quran without recourse to the vast corpus of older interpretive
literature and debates results in a less capacious sensibility, reducing the scope for
diversity in thought and practice.
In the last three decades, Javed Ahmed Ghamidi has emerged as a prominent
thinker and public intellectual, not just within Pakistan, but also at an international
level, hailed in an American newspaper as ‘a bit of a rock star – adored, hated,
popular, and notorious all at once’.2 As a prominent scholar of the Quran he brings

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426 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

together religious learning with a wide accessibility in his role as a public intellec-
tual. Currently in exile, due ostensibly to his liberal and tolerant views that have
excited extremist responses, Ghamidi continues to play an important role in con-
temporary Islamic intellectual debates, particularly in urban Pakistan’s public
sphere through his publishing (including the journals Ishraq in Urdu and
Renaissance in English), TV show, research and teaching institute (al-Mawrid)
and school system (Mus’ab schools).
However, attempts at classifying Ghamidi’s thought raise interesting challenges:
he has been called a ‘critical traditionalist’ (Masud, 2007: 356) but also a ‘liberal
reformer’ (Yasmin, 2012: 177). This places him in directly oppositional categories
within the dominant Western academic framework of classifying Islamic thought, in
which tradition and reform continue to frame a binary.3 These challenges are pro-
ductive in exploring the changing political valence of the idea of tradition in the
contemporary politico-intellectual context of the ongoing war on/of terror and raise
important considerations in tracing the contours of revivalism in contemporary
Islamic thought. I suggest that a previous schema of associating reform with
Muslim modernists, and stagnation or resistance with traditional or traditionalist
thinkers, is particularly redundant in the face of a new generation of scholars who are
keen to be defined as traditionalists or at least as being closely bound to the tradition.
Revivalism in modern Islamic tradition, I suggest here, has been primarily concerned
with calibration of method and sensibility, some revivalists privileging one and some
the other of these two key constituents of tradition. More critically then, these
debates allow greater depth to our understanding of vibrancy within a tradition.

Taqlid, Ijtihad and modern Islamic thought

Scholars of Euro-American political thought speak easily of the Western tradition,
or the liberal or Marxist traditions. However, as soon as we turn our focus to
Islamic political thought, as well as most other non-Western thought, chame-
leon-like, the term ‘tradition’ changes meaning. Tradition takes on stagist conno-
tations, and in the Euro-American academic study of Islamic thought it is defined
primarily in relation to the ideas of ‘modernity’ or ‘reform’: on this reading, the
Islamic tradition is inevitably too traditional.
In fact, the idea of ‘tradition’ has a complex and important history in Islamic
thought, which is useful to consider separately from the Western academic study of
Islam. Classical Islamic thought is immensely self-conscious about being a trad-
ition, in terms of knowledge production and consumption, with long running
debates on the method and the sensibility that are contained within it. For instance,
there is great emphasis on both a method and sensibility for recording and judging
the hadith (sayings of the Prophet) and sunna (life of the Prophet and his compan-
ions) as they are seen to provide exemplary guidance to the question of the good
life. In terms of method, there is an emphasis on establishing how the sunnan and
ahadith (sing. hadith) are recorded, which accounts can be deemed reliable, who
recounted them and to whom, how precisely might these be interpreted. In terms of
sensibility there is an interest in establishing the philosophical basis for using hadith

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Iqtidar 427

or sunna and working through their role in producing specific subjectivities and
social realities. All of this has received a lot of attention in Islamic philosophical and
juridical literature precisely because of the interest in fusing both the method
and the sensibility, practice and philosophy. Indeed, in the Islamic context juridical
and philosophical literature often overlaps considerably since questions of practice
in particular social contexts are linked inextricably to questions of philosophical
premises and recognised explicitly as such.
Two important concepts that bring this aspect of tradition to the fore are taqlid
and ijtihad. Ijtihad is independent interpretation of the Quran, and since the early
20th century has been seen as a panacea to the purported stagnation of Islamic
thought. Here, I shall focus more on taqlid not just to highlight the ways in which it
is misunderstood, but also because it is in the details of its misinterpretation that we
find important clues for thinking about the question of tradition. Taqlid is a con-
scious decision, both by the scholar and the lay person, about which mujtahid
(innovative or creative interpreter), or mazhab (philosophical school)4 to follow in
defining what makes a good Muslim life. In his pioneering work, Hallaq has argued
persuasively that the consolidation of taqlid as an important element of Muslim life
was meant primarily as a way for the different scholars and jurists to anchor their
own reasoning (Hallaq, 2009: 110–113) as well as a way to separate out the mujtahids
– those who have the intellectual and spiritual ability to innovate – from other
scholars (Hallaq, 2009: 75). Different classical scholars supported varying versions
of taqlid, from ‘following the opinion’ to ‘following the person’. For instance, the
13th-century scholar Al-Amidi (d. 631 AH/1233 CE) favoured following the person,
i.e. the scholar, because he argued that while thought and reflection are universal to
all human beings, the average person may find it hard to assess the weight of evi-
dence behind each opinion, but may still be able to discern more readily between a
more learned authority than a less learned scholar (Rahman, 1965: 161). Contrary
to the claims of orientalist scholars who have seen taqlid as a kind of blind following,
whether of established schools of jurisprudence or of particular rituals only, it is
useful to recognise that for the average believing Muslim, in theory at least, the
choice about which scholar to follow to ground one’s ethical behaviour is an open
one, but one that carries within it an active recognition of the method (e.g. how to
use particular resources such as ahadith) as well as philosophical sensibility (e.g.
what ethical goals are of primary importance) of individual scholars as well as of the
different philosophical schools or mazahib (sing. mazhab). Taqlid then is not just
about ritual but also about philosophy, not just method but also sensibility. One
important advantage of taqlid has been that it allowed sometimes opposing, and
often very different ways of being Muslim to be equally valid (Hallaq, 2013;
Jackson, 1996; Rahman, 1965: 163; Rapaport, 2003). This capaciousness, as well
as a lack of reliance on state imposition, has allowed sharia as Islamic legal and
moral guidance immense entrenchment in social life (Hallaq, 2013).
From the Islamic sixth (and Christian 12th) century taqlid has been more
prominent in Islamic juridical literature and practice, but ijtihad too has been
continuously invoked even if it did not dominate. Taqlid allowed predictability
and flexibility at the same time. Providing predictable responses based on the

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428 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

sensibility and method of each mazhab allowed significant social stability. At the
same time, given the diversity contained within the different mazahib or schools
that were recognised as equally valid, ordinary Muslims were afforded significant
choice and plasticity within sharia. Some schools became associated with particular
activities, e.g. sales of charitable endowments are often conducted under Hanbali
mazhab because Hanbali interpretation allow for such sales while others do not
support it. At the same time, it was possible for people who would ordinarily follow
one school of interpretation to bring specific legal cases to another school’s courts.
For instance, under Mamluk rule (659–923 AH/1261–1517 CE) the predominantly
Hanafi military elite would take endowment sales cases to Hanbali courts
(Rapoport, 2003: 22). Indeed, even qadis or jurists could move from one mazhab
to another (Rapoport, 2003: 227).
Paradoxically given this flexibility and capaciousness, taqlid had been translated
by influential European scholars in terms of blind adherence to established norms
or tradition, as ‘imitation’ (Coulson, 1964: 80), ‘servile imitation’ (Makdisi, 1981:
199) and ‘unquestioning acceptance’ (Schacht, 1964: 71). Taqlid became associated
with ‘intellectual timidity, and/or depletion of creative and interpretive energies’
(Jackson, 1996: 170). European scholars and administrators built upon early
modern, pre-colonial Islamic movements of reform and renewal such as those
led by Ibn Wahab in Arabia and Shah Wali Ullah in India, both of whom criticised
excessive reliance on taqlid. However, these Muslim scholars saw taqlid in a com-
plementary relationship with creative interpretation or ijtihad (Dallal, 1993).
Colonial administrators incorporated that internal critique into a dramatically sus-
tained attack on taqlid itself. This attack was also inflected with their own concep-
tions of tradition. From the late 18th century, relying on an Enlightenment
conception of tradition as unchanging and regressive, a conflation of tradition as
blind adherence and taqlid as tradition was operationalised by colonial scholars/
administrators in their policy decisions. In South Asia, such assumptions played a
role in the homogenisation, codification and ultimately stagnation of sharia that
the British administrators carried out under the rubric of Anglo-Mohammaden law
with the aspiration to standardise. This codification led to the loss of precisely that
internal diversity, even contradiction, that made sharia adaptable and alive, such
that by the late 19th century, what was by then called Mohammedan law was seen
by many urban Muslims too as stagnant (Kugle, 2001). Urban Muslim modernist
reformers such as Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Amir Ali5 appropriated and inter-
nalised this framing of taqlid and tradition. For instance, Amir Ali singled out
taqlid for particular attack by arguing that

it is a common belief that since the four Imams no scholar has arisen qualified to
interpret the laws of the Prophet. No account is taken of the altered circumstances in
which Moslems are placed. . .They mixed up the temporary with the permanent and
the universal with the particular. (cited in Binder (1957: 387))

The gulf between urban Muslims who were exposed most dramatically to
‘Mohammedan’ law, and rural Muslims who continued with more localised

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Iqtidar 429

sharia adjudication, was reflected by the early 20th century in calls for a drastic
transformation of taqlid amongst segments of urban Muslims. The immense cre-
ativity of Islamic thought since the late 19th century (Iqtidar, 2011: 38–54) is
structured precisely around these questions of taqlid, looking to calibrate the rela-
tionship between method and sensibility.

Tradition across disciplines

The history of political thought has remained somewhat insulated from such
debates about tradition in other places and in other disciplines. Even as Islamic
thought was being studied through the binary of tradition and reform through the
mid-20th century, within the wider discipline of history, historians had started
challenging the idea of tradition as unchanging, monolithic and timeless. The
much-quoted Hobsbawm and Ranger volume The Invention of Tradition (1983)
pointed out the recent creation of many traditions. But more significant than
this recognition that many ‘traditional’ practices were of recent manufacture was
the realisation that modernity could not be defined without creating for it a par-
ticular past from which to distinguish it. That is, a tradition of the past had to be
invented to act as a foil for all that modernity brought and to clarify what mod-
ernity entailed.
In part, this recognition of the role of tradition in enlightenment thought and its
definition of European modernity has been the result of post-colonial critiques and
their questions regarding the conflation of reform with modernity (Asad, 1993,
2003; Chakaraborty, 2000; Chatterjee, 1994). Post-colonial critique has made a
concentrated push against the definition of modernity as a uniquely European
experience that relegated the rest of the world to what Chakraborty (2000: 8)
has aptly called ‘the waiting room of history’; of capitalism as the West’s self-
generated and self-sustained revolution divorced of its relationship to colonialism
(Mignolo, 1999; Prakash, 1996) and of categories of analysis that have claimed
universal application without adequately demonstrating their ability to move
beyond a European provenance. All of this has led to the recognition of the multi-
plicity of ways in which traditions, particularly intellectual traditions, and mod-
ernity may be intertwined. What emerges, also, is a clear sense that it is crucial to
separate modernity as a period from modernity as a project for the non-western
world to emulate.
Building directly or indirectly on post-colonial theory, a generation of scholars
in Anglo-American academia has over the last two decades engaged with Islamic
thought and thinkers with greater subtlety (Al-Azmeh, 1993; Browers, 2006;
Brown, 1996; Devji, 2007; Euben, 1999; Zaman, 2002). Thinkers who had been
labelled resistant to change by orientalist scholars such as Bernard Lewis, as well as
by Islamic modernists such as Fazlur Rehman, were reconsidered as creative, if
critical, interlocutors with European modernity. Those labelled as fundamentalist
have been recognised as pursuing reform but without accepting the conceptual
hegemony of Western categories of analysis.6 This recent body of scholarship
has been concerned primarily with demonstrating that many revivalists

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430 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

and ‘fundamentalists’ are not traditionalists in the sense of resisting change, as had
been assumed by a previous generation of scholars. It has also successfully opened
up the category of the modern to include a wider range of members. This schol-
arship has highlighted the long running engagement with new modes of thought,
categories of analysis and political realities that Islamic as well as Islamist political
thinking has entailed in the last two centuries.7 Yet, one lacuna in this scholarship
is that tradition remains under-conceptualised.
In the case of Islam there have also been differently inflected debates across
different disciplines. When anthropologists came across the diversity of ideas and
practices observed under the banner of Islam they either relegated them to ‘little
traditions’ (as opposed to ‘great traditions’ of script-based ideas and practices
based on the schema proposed by Robert Redfield in 1956), or abandoned this
classification altogether, asserting that there is no one Islam to study and observe.
This was, as mentioned earlier, in tension with conversations in other disciplines
such as history and religious studies, where scholars of Islamic jurisprudence and
political ideas attempted to identify the key concepts that held Islam together over
the many centuries. The only unifying feature across the different disciplines was
the suspicion that Islam remained ‘traditional’ in the modern age.
It is within this context that the cultural anthropologist and post-colonial the-
orist Talal Asad argued that Islam needs to be viewed as a ‘discursive tradition’ and
separated from questions of modernity (2009):

. . . [O]ne needs to recognize that when one talks about tradition, one should be talking
about, in a sense, a dimension of social life and not a stage of social development. In
an important sense, tradition and modernity are not really two mutually exclusive
states of a culture or society but different aspects of historicity.8

Asad argues that we speak of the liberal tradition, not as a stage of development, but
as a body of ideas and practices which has its roots in European history.9 Asad’s
argument is not that liberalism is a mix of the traditional and the modern, but that it
is a tradition that is central to modernity. Thus, he suggests we may envision a
tradition as a broad vocabulary of ideas and practices, which constrain and inspire
adherents at any given moment in history without precluding different arrange-
ments in other times and places. In doing so, Asad resolves, or at least moves
past, the question of the great and little tradition, and also the idea of many
Islams. Islam emerges in Asad’s work (1993) as a capacious vocabulary that is as
modern as any other, even as it carries within it medieval and pre-modern ideas.
More interestingly, for our purposes here, the closer focus on the relationship
between thought and practice that Asad insists on, allows more fruitful ways of
engaging with histories of political thought beyond the text.10 Asad argues, like
Alasdair Macintyre,11 whose ideas on tradition were useful for Asad, that the
dichotomy between thought and practice is a product of a particular European
history but one that is not helpful in understanding either. One reason why Asad
disputes the thought/practice dichotomy is because it renders analysis more sus-
ceptible to bypassing questions of power.12 Implicit in this particular criticism is an

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Iqtidar 431

aspect of his larger critique of liberalism as a tradition unmoored from its religious
origins and unable to recognise its contradictions because of that disconnect.13
Thus, we now have an expanded notion of traditions, and of Islamic tradition in
particular, not as the deadweight of the past, but as systems of thought and practice
that include both method and sensibility, with a symbiotic relationship between
knowledge production and its consumption, and which can sustain debate, differ-
ence and questioning without being overcome and transformed completely by
them.14 Reform and revision is not the sole preserve of the modern but an integral
part of sustaining a tradition. The recent work of scholars like Hallaq (2009, 2001,
2013), Khaduri (1984) and Zaman (2002, 2012) has given us an understanding of
debate, discussion, reform and retrenchment that has been a part of both the
classical and modern Islamic tradition. Movements of renewal or tajdid have
been integral to Islam throughout its history. Moreover, the assumption that
modern Muslim revivalism is inspired only by Wahabism15 or only as a reaction
to colonial imposition flies in the face of the immense diversity of inspirations and
ideas with which Muslim revivalists have engaged.
To lend more depth to this claim, we might take another look at South Asian
Muslim revivalists. Despite the characterisation of this late 19th and early 20th
century as a period of intellectual decay, and the ulema (Islamic scholars and
jurists) as a parasitical class who foster this decay, by Muslims modernists and
orientalist scholars, it was a period of extraordinary creativity and debate among
religious scholars who engaged with colonial conditions but also built directly or
indirectly upon the pre-colonial reform movement of Shah Waliullah (1703–
1762)16 in Delhi (Gilmartin, 1988; Lelyveld, 1978; Metcalf, 1982; Sanyal, 2005).
Indeed, South Asia in particular has been home to significant creativity within the
Islamic tradition, in terms of schools of thought (Deobandi,17 Barelwi18), organ-
isational arrangements (Tablighi Jamaat19), syncretic approaches to Islamic learn-
ing across the Shia–Sunni divide (Farangi Mahal20) and an engagement with non-
Abrahamic faiths such as Hindu and Buddhist traditions (see Gilmartin and
Lawrence, 2000). Yet all of these innovations were carried out within the frame-
work of reviving and rejuvenating the tradition. From the Islamist Maududi to
the pietist Mohammed Ilyas, the nationalist alim Abul Kalam to the socialist
Maulana Bhashani and even the modernist Fazlur Rehman, revivalists have
been working through different calibrations of method and sensibility to reinvig-
orate the tradition. It is particularly useful to recognise that modernists like
Fazlur Rehman, Amir Ali and Syed Ahmed Khan were also looking to revive
Islam and engaged deeply with it despite their criticism of the ‘traditionalists’.21
Their effort was focused primarily on extracting the sensibility or an essence from
the tradition, or to expand the repertoire of methods, but it was never a complete
rejection of both. Thus, Islamic reform cannot be understood in opposition to
tradition. Moreover, it is not just triggered by colonialism or as a reaction to
modernity. Instead, Islamic revivalism in the modern period has been a multifa-
ceted, creative, more than two-century-long engagement with the question of the
perfect balance between method and sensibility given new modes of governance
and social organisation.

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432 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

Javed Ahmed Ghamidi: Tradition and method

In this section, I bring more depth to the discussion above by elaborating the
calibration of method and sensibility in Javed Ahmed Ghamidi’s thought, and
by indicating how a dramatic focus on one aspect (in Ghamidi’s case, on
method) has the potential to limit the vibrancy of debate. In English-language
media coverage of Ghamidi’s work, he is generally proclaimed as a liberal thinker,
a designation Ghamidi has never appropriated for himself.22 It is pertinent to point
out at this early stage that Ghamidi’s rise to prominence is tarnished, at least
partially, through an association with military dictatorship in Pakistan and
America’s war of terror in the region. The wars in Afghanistan, and Iraq, and
an associated programme of promoting secularism, and somewhat paradoxically,
‘traditionalist’ thought,23 in Muslim countries often at the cost of democracy,
played out in Pakistan with US support for the military dictatorship of General
Musharraf for close to 11 years. One of the key publicly provided reasons for
Western support for Musharraf’s regime was its perceived value as a bulwark
against religious fundamentalism in the region. Obligingly, Musharraf instituted
a programme of ‘Enlightened Moderation’24 which entailed, among other primar-
ily discursive overtures against religious fundamentalism, the appointment of
Ghamidi as a member of the Council for Islamic Ideology.25 Some commentators
have implied opportunism26 on Ghamidi’s part due to the elision of his ideas
against Islamism with the General’s regime. Critics have argued that he is not
really an alim (a religiously trained scholar) or even a believer (Japanwala, 2008:
17). Such criticism raised implicit and explicit questions about his appointment to
the constitutional body. However, prior to his appointment, Ghamidi had already
established a significant public presence for himself through his TV shows, regular
writings and the publication of exegetical works: Al-Burhan (The Proof) and Al-
Mizan (The Scales). Ghamidi’s television programme Deen aur Danish (Religious
Perspective and Reason) was immensely popular among urban, educated and
upper class audiences.27
Ghamidi’s hesitation in appropriating the mantel of a liberal Islamic reformer
indicates his desire to be seen to be transforming the tradition from within.
Without implying strategic positioning on Ghamidi’s part, it is important to rec-
ognise that his intellectual effort coincides with an international interest in what is
being called ‘traditionalist’ Islamic thought that entails an attempt at outma-
noeuvring the Islamists by claiming greater authenticity for ideas opposed to
theirs.28 Of course, these US-led attempts at managing Islamic discourse to pro-
duce less political and militant versions of Islam are not seamlessly translated from
intention to effect (Aziz, 2011; Mahmood, 2006). It is more useful to recognise and
appreciate the internal dynamics that couple with such hegemonic attempts to
produce new constellations of ideas. Indeed, many of the new traditionalists view
themselves as building on epistemological premises more sophisticated than the
modernists and are trying to rethink the shift in emphasis towards ‘modernising
Islam’ brought about by an earlier generation of reformers (Kersten, 2015). Yet,
at the very least, this international political–intellectual context provides salience

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Iqtidar 433

to their ideas and often an international audience that continues to imagine Islamic
reformism as a recent endeavour.29
Within this context Javed Ahmed Ghamidi follows a particular path opened up
by his teacher,30 Maulana Islahi (1904–1997) and Islahi’s mentor Maulana Farahi
(1863–1930), but brings an intensity to the question of method that is much more
dramatic than either of his erstwhile teachers ever imagined. Farahi and Islahi were
both brilliant scholars, trained in what has been called the ‘traditional’ mode of
education, which refers primarily to being educated at a madrasah. Islahi was a
student of Farahi at the Madrassa-e-Islah (hence the name ‘Islahi’, i.e. ‘of Islah’)
established by Maualana Farahi. Moving beyond the simplistic, sharp dichotomy
between traditional and modern education often associated with madaris, it is
useful to recognise that Maulana Farahi studied Arabic poetry in Lahore with
Maualana Fayz-al-Hassan Saharanpuri (1816–1887) and then moved to Aligarh
University, the seat of Muslim modernist thought (Lelyveld, 1978) where he
engaged closely with the German orientalist Jozef Horowitz (1874–1931) and some-
what less enthusiastically with the English orientalist Sir Thomas Walker Arnold
(1864–1930).31 Farahi also had the experience of traveling in the Persian Gulf with
the then British Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, in 190332 as a scholar with com-
mand over Persian, Arabic and English languages. On setting up madrassa Islah,
Maulana Farahi brought these, and a diverse range of other influences to bear on
the curriculum as well as the general organisation.
That Farahi, like his friend Shibli Nomani, was first a poet and philosopher was
reflected in the curriculum of the madrassa that he set up in Saharanpur in North
India. There was a strong emphasis on Arabic literature in particular and an
exploration of the philosophical principles in Quran. He used pre-Islamic Arabic
poetry and literature as a guide to understanding the meanings and implications of
words used in the Quran. He read mythical accounts, historiographical explan-
ations and maps with equal interest to appreciate the references made in the Quran.
And finally, he read some contemporary European philosophical literature. One of
his key works, a critique of the work of Al-Jurjani, the 11th-century Persian scholar
of Arabic rhetoric and metaphorical language, is linked to his critique of Greek
philosophy in Islam. Writing in Arabic, he wrote for, by his own admission, only
an audience of other ulema, that is scholars like him. Farahi’s key innovation was
to insist upon an organising principle, an order – a nazm – in the breakdown of
Quranic verses and chapters.
Amin Ahsan Islahi, one of the many brilliant scholars who flocked to Farahi’s
madrassa, worked primarily as a journalist33 after completing his studies. In 1922,
Islahi returned to the madrasah on Farahi’s request and took up an extended study
of the Quran with Farahi. Soon after he also started teaching at the madrassa.
Building on his teacher’s work, Islahi further developed his approach to system-
atising the study of Quran. Moreover, building on his training in medieval Arabic
poetry that he received from his teacher Farahi (who in turn had been taught
by one of the pre-eminent scholars of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry Maulana Fayz-
ul-Hassan Saharanpuri at the Anglo-Oriental College in Lahore in the 1830s) Islahi
suggested that Quranic verses need to be interpreted in accordance with Arabic

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434 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

poetic norms of Mohammed’s period. For instance, if there is confusion about

multiple meanings of a word, then the meaning used most commonly in Arabic
poetry at the time of the Prophet Mohammed can be assumed to hold.
Interestingly, despite Farahi and his pupil Islahi’s insistence on methodological
continuity, Islahi was one of the few madrassa-trained ulema who lent support to
Abul Ala Maududi’s (1903–1979) Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami at a time when
Islamism was seen as a grotesque innovation by the majority of ulema and none
were willing to join it (Iqtidar, 2011: 108–112). Islahi’s 19-year long association
with JI has not received adequate assessment nor indeed is Ghamidi’s al-Mawrid
institute literature quick to point out that Islahi finally parted with the Jamaat-e-
Islami in protest against JI’s decision to support a female candidate in Pakistan’s
presidential elections.34 Somewhat paradoxically, during the 1960s, the CIA sus-
pected Islahi of being a communist sympathiser (Nasr, 1996: 172).
Ghamidi, a pupil of Islahi, has followed him and has deepened that search for
the organising principles of Quran and has identified seven distinct groups within
which the Quran can be divided (2011: 51–53). Moving away from Farahi’s insist-
ence on writing in Arabic (Ghamidi writes in the more accessible Urdu) Ghamidi
has built upon Ishahi’s creative scheme for interpreting the Quran and Hadith but
proceeded beyond his teachers’ path to alter the method dramatically and severely
limit reliance on the existing fiqh (interpretive) literature.35 This vast body of lit-
erature includes interpretive and theoretical works on sharia, the broad normative
guidelines that are meant to underpin an Islamic society. This move is linked to the
distinction that he wants to make between Divine guidance and its interpretation
(Shahzad, 2011: 12). Interpretation remains open to mistakes but Divine guidance
is absolute and pure. Fiqh literature, by implication, is open to mistakes and con-
fusion and thus not a reliable resource.
Ghamidi establishes further procedures for the use of hadith (sayings of the
Prophet) to supplement the understanding of Quran. He argues that hadith can
only be taken as a supplementary explanation of ideas and injunctions in the Quran
(2011: 64–68) and cannot be taken to add anything beyond what is in the Quran.
More dramatically, in his bid to contextualise the Quran historically he has argued
for an innovative use of Sunna by suggesting that sunna represent particular prac-
tices rather than a philosophy (2011: 10, 61–64). Thus, hadith and sunna can only
have a limited role to play in interpreting the Quran. More critically, while some
interpretation of Quran were valid for the Prophet and Muslims around him to
undertake at the time, they are no longer legitimate for any individual or group of
Muslims to operationalise now. This is not because, as many have insisted before
him, modern statecraft and other paraphernalia of modernity did not exist then,
but rather because having the Prophet in their midst gave the Muslim community
of the time a clear advantage in understanding and interpreting the Quran (2011:
452). Today’s Muslims do not have such a clear model in front of them so they
cannot be expected to do full justice to some of those duties.
Building on the literary approach of Maulana Farahi, Ghamidi further argues
that Quranic interpretation has to proceed through the application of the widely
used meanings of Arabic terms of the time of the Quran as they are found in literary

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Iqtidar 435

material from the period. In fact, he argues, classical exegesis has often misunder-
stood terms because the exegetes have not understood that the Quran is not a book
of laws and instead is a kind of literary production (2011: 26–27) that needs to be
approached as such keeping in mind the intricacies of the predominantly oral cul-
ture of the period. Applying this clearly delineated and fairly strict approach,
Ghamidi has undertaken to overturn some previously dominant readings of
Quran by emphasising a different connotation or meaning to terms.
Ghamidi methodology implies a highly restricted role for individual interpret-
ation of the Quran. This is in stark contrast with Islamist parties like the Jamaat-e-
Islami, which advocated a radical break from mediated religious practices that
operated through the charisma and spiritual power of local ulema, sufi saints,
pirs and preachers. The Islamist’s break from cultural practices of indirect inter-
pretation and access appealed to a new class of upwardly mobile, previously lower
middle class college graduates of early to mid-20th century, who felt that they now
had the tools to interpret sharia themselves. Ghamidi speaks to a new generation of
Muslims who have seen their parents trying to carry the burden of interpreting
sharia for themselves, and realised how daunting it is. Ghamidi does not take away
the option of individual analysis and interpretation, but lays down strict rules while
explicating strongly that those rules can only be followed by those who have
immersed themselves in specialised study of Arabic poetry, Quranic hermeneutics,
Muslim history and related subjects (2011: 19–40). Thus, while the option for lay
individuals to interpret sharia and Quran remains open in principle, for all intents
and purposes it is not one just anybody can realistically pursue. This despite the
fact that Ghamidi cuts out a major source of Quranic interpretation which is the
fiqh literature.
One important example of the implications of Ghamidi’s insistence on his spe-
cific method is his vision of the state. He establishes a strictly minimalist role for the
state while at the same time exhorting Muslims to ‘fully cling to state authority in
all circumstances’ (Ghamidi, 2011: 452). The state has not just the right, but the
duty to decide when to wage war. However, through this reasoning, the decision is,
in Ghamidi’s view, taken firmly out of the hands of individuals. Ghamidi’s reading
of ‘political sharia’ (2011: 451–464) does not allow the state any right to pronounce
some groups non-Muslims or to impose metrics of piety, such as fasting, praying or
covering their heads, on its citizens. In a subtle and implicit way, Ghamidi is
negating the state-led Islamising initiative undertaken during the regime of a pre-
vious military dictator, General Zia (1977–1988) in Pakistan. Committed to meth-
odological purity, Ghamidi does not question the right of the state to impose laws
based on sharia but hollows out existing Islamic laws of their moral force. This is
not an inadvertent move on his part but a deeply thoughtful and nuanced one.
His socially restrained and minimalist state is nevertheless very powerful.
Ghamidi privileges laws of the state – even if the state is not explicitly Islamic –
in a manner that is radical, despite his understated style. He argues that the laws in
a Muslim majority state should be decided through achieving a consensus
among the majority of the citizens (pp.452–455). In fact, he argues that shura
or consultation is an obligation (p.462) and no Muslim collectivity should be

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436 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

organised without this important principle enshrined in the institutions. Individual

scholars, as well as citizens might have opposing interpretations of sharia guidelines
and the state cannot impose demands for religious performance on its citizens,
whether Muslim or non-Muslim. However, he also argues that beyond matters
of religious observance, once established through whatever means, state laws
have primacy, because any attempt at transforming them will lead to strife.
Laws can only be changed slowly and so until that happens, they should be
acknowledged and followed. Ulema, and all citizens, have the right to debate
and discuss laws but their discussions, and even protests, should remain within
the framework of laws, however tightly drawn that framework might be.
Relationships between Muslims residing in different states cannot be on the
basis of nation (qaum) but on the basis of brotherhood (akhuwat). He argues
in his article Islam aur Riyasat aik Jawabi nazaria (Islam and The State:
An Alternative Perspective36) that Muslims are not required to give up their
national identities to be Muslim but rather to cultivate a feeling of love towards
other Muslims. That is, he argues that what the rise of sectarianism in Muslim
countries requires is not the imposition of secularism but an Islamic counter-nar-
rative that binds these Muslims together but at the same time, does not undermine
their national affiliations. Here, he counters the idea of ummah that Islamists have
used by arguing that it should not be made to compete directly with national
identities and Muslims should engage embrace fully life in whichever state they
find themselves in as long as that state does not impose a heavy burden on them.
With these arguments, Ghamidi has used a strict hermeneutic methodology to
come to conclusions that merge smoothly with the liberal conception of the state
with its emphasis on legality, evolutionary change and secular nationalism.
Similarly, he has articulated a critique of individualised actions as jihad that is
particularly pertinent to concerns about radicalisation within the context of the
ongoing and continuously intensifying war on terror. In his reading of the rights of
religious minorities as well as the rights of women, Ghamidi privileges a human
rights conception. Mohammed Khalid Masud, a noted scholar, like Ghamidi a
student of Maulana Islahi, and a one-time chair of the Council of Islamic
Ideology, has rightly suggested that Ghamidi’s key innovation is to bring a
human rights approach into Islamic discourse without referring directly to the
concept or terminology of human rights (Masud, 2007). Indeed, as discussed
above, Javed Ghamidi makes no direct reference to sources other than Quran
and Sunna, avoiding the more widely used sources of hadith and established fiqh
literature. Moreover, despite his repeated references to Allama Iqbal, the South-
Asian poet philosopher as an inspiration for his attempts at the ‘reconstruction’ of
Islamic thought, Ghamidi does not explicitly own cosmopolitan sources in the way
that Iqbal did. Iqbal, the poet-philosopher of late colonial India (1877–1938)
acknowledged influences as diverse as the South Asian poet Hali, the German
philosophers Nietzsche and Hegel, the Irish novelist Joyce and the Persian poet
Hafiz.
It is important to Ghamidi that in his exegetical texts and commentaries he
follows the strict methodology he has defined and claims is the true rendition

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Iqtidar 437

of the Islamic tradition.37 Ghamidi’s intense focus on method that excludes the use
of fiqh and maintains a strict focus only on the Quran based on the systematisation
he has devised, can be seen as a long running conversation with the modernist
reformers who showed a disregard for method, such as the modernist Amir Ali
who advocated privileging ‘the spirit above the letter’ of Islamic tradition (Binder,
1957: 387). More critically, the invisible but palpable presence in all of Ghamidi’s
writings is the Islamist Maududi, Ghamidi’s one-time teacher and mentor. In many
respects, Ghamidi’s thought is a deep engagement with and criticism of Maududi’s
ideas. However, in inverting the balance towards method, privileging the text alone,
he shifts the emphasis to a narrower conception of tradition in two important ways.
Interesting and important sources of analysis such as the fiqh literature are left
without a convincing role in the tradition. And second, the sensibility of accom-
modating ambiguities and difference that he also acknowledges is an important
aspect of the tradition loses its capacious contradictions through this dependence
upon a very narrow range of sources.
Thus, Ghamidi’s method eliminates the recognition of the significant debate and
discussion that has existed in fiqh and related literature on the relationship between
state and law (sharia versus qanun debates). A defining aspect of sharia in all the
years of Islamic history, and indeed its strength, has been in social self-enforcement
rather than through the state (Agrama, 2010; Gilmartin, 1988; Hallaq, 2013;
Khaduri, 1984). Ghamidi undermines the state’s right to enforce sharia without
consultation and democratic checks, but as the discussion above indicates he also
paradoxically establishes the conceptual supremacy of the state to enforce sharia as
law. Moreover, he shies away from a critical engagement with how precisely the
state has transformed in the modern period. Instead he takes as given the liberal
conception of a state that provides the locus of majoritarian aspirations and gov-
ernance through laws. In accepting this conceptual supremacy of the state without
really exploring the dynamics of its institutions, the mechanisms through which a
consultation might actually be carried, the relationships of power that may inhere
in the modern state, Ghamidi forecloses important avenues of debate and discus-
sion. There is for instance, little leeway for alternative readings once the strict rules
that Ghamidi lays down are followed (Amin, 2012: 179–182). The emphasis on
method in this instance tends towards greater sterility and rigidity even if under-
taken with the intention of innovation.

Conclusion
My interest here is not in critiquing Ghamidi’s thought but to use the difficulty of
categorising his ideas within the dominant framework of traditionalists versus
modernists/reformists to show in more depth the problems with defining tradition
on historicist bases. Building on the discussion of taqlid I have suggested an alter-
native definition of tradition that would be helpful through a clearer demarcation
of the constituent elements of tradition in political thought more generally.
Moreover, I have argued that the vibrancy of a tradition is a calibration of both
method and sensibility; neither can exist without the other although individual

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438 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

thinkers may emphasise one over the other. Within modern Islamic political
thought the discussion about how to achieve the perfect balance between the two
is the primary focus of long running and wide-ranging debates rather than accept-
ing or rejecting modernity. The interest in pitting traditionalists against Islamists,
or modernists against the militants, in the current context of the war on terror not
only misses the axes along which these debates within the Islamic tradition are
aligned, but ultimately represents certain colonial hubris in believing that they can
be turned right around to conform to American interests in a tradition that has a
diverse range of dedicated knowledge producers (ulema) and a wide variety of
knowledge consumers. Placing Ghamidi’s thought within the wider political con-
text also highlights the changing political valence of tradition. Ultimately, new
histories of political thought need to not only contend with new sources and
resources, but more importantly, they need to redefine terms of use to engage
meaningfully with a wider range of ideas.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Gilmartin, Talal Asad, Ovarmir Anjum, Leigh Jenco, Ruben Ruiz
Rafino and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this paper.
Drafts of this paper were also presented at the New Histories of Political Thought confer-
ence, co-sponsored by LSE and the London Comparative Political Theory group, and the
Dept. of Political Economy research seminar at King’s College London. I am grateful to all
those who raised questions and comments to think through.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the European Research
Council grant for the project ‘Tolerance in Contemporary Muslim Politics: Political Theory
Beyond the West’.

Notes
1. It is important to recognise at this early stage that translating sharia as Islamic law is not
entirely accurate since sharia does not comprise of specific laws but a set of moral and
legal guidelines that can be adapted to particular situations.
2. Mufti S. The fundamentalist moderate. Boston Globe, 22 July 2007. Available at: http://
www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/07/22/the_fundamentalist_moderate/?
page=full (accessed 15 January 2016).
3. Islamist thought, in particular, had been classified as a traditional reaction to modernity
(Ayubi, 1991; Sivan, 1985; Tibi, 1988, 1998), where tradition is defined primarily as that
which is resistant to change. Those who sought to reform Islam were seen as modernists
or at least as modern. One influential instance of this way of thinking is Fazlur Rahman
(1982) the Pakistani scholar who taught for several decades at the University of Chicago
after having served, during the 1960s, as the Chairman of the Council of Islamic Ideology

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Iqtidar 439

in Pakistan. He both popularised and exemplified the modernist Islamic thinker (Berry,
2006) arguing vociferously for ijtihad against taqlid.
4. I use the term philosophical school here rather than the more commonly used juridical
school. The focus on the juridical aspect of these schools of thought has obscured the
fact that these schools or mazahib are not merely founded on technical differences but on
different philosophical approaches as well as for reasons of historical contingency (see
Hallaq, 2009; 2001; Rahman, 1965).
5. They were both urban Muslims who sought a position for Muslims within the colonial
administration but were, no doubt, also enthused by ideas that were new to them and
came from their engagement with western educational institutions.
6. See in particular Euben’s (1997) very helpful discussion of the Egyptian Islamist thinker
Syed Qutb’s engagement with modernity. Similarly, Iqtidar (2011) has argued that
influential South Asian Islamist Abul Ala Maududi was an innovative modernist thin-
ker who had engaged deeply with the idea of the modern state.
7. We see the problem with the binary of reform as modernity versus tradition as lack
of change that has been imposed on Islamic political thought as soon as we undertake
a comparison in terms of a radical break with previously held ideas. Marshall Hodgson
(1977), a historian of Islam, had observed at the end of his exploration of Islamic
history that in terms of continued reliance on the same texts and ideas for several
centuries, European thought is much more traditional. Islamic thought and other
non-western traditions have incorporated new conceptual frames and categories,
unfamiliar institutional and ideational arrangements that were imposed during
colonialism.
8. Interview Talal Asad by Saba Mahmood (1996) Modern power and the reconfiguration
of religious traditions. Available at: https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-1/text/asad.
html (accessed 16 August 2016)
9. While it useful to think through the precise religious lineage of some central liberal ideas
as Asad does, it is important also to be wary of assuming that liberalism was generated
entirely internally within Europe. Uday Mehta (1999) and Buck-Morss (2009) among
others have shown how integral experiences and ideas from Asian and American colo-
nies were in formulating liberal ideas.
10. In questioning the thought/practice dichotomy one of Asad’s interests was in critiquing
the textualisation of Muslim social life but at the same time, this critique opens up, I
believe, avenues for political theorists to grapple with resources beyond texts. In the case
of Javed Ahmed Ghamidi his TV shows cannot be seen as providing the platform for
readymade ideas but in fact, the mechanisms through which ideas are given shape,
thought through and related to everyday life. New histories of political thought must
contend with new sources and resources beyond texts.
11. MacIntyre (2011: 72) treats the theory of emotivism ‘not only as a philosophical analysis
but also as a sociological hypothesis’. He goes on to elaborate that he is unhappy about
having to put the matter in this way because it remains unclear ‘how any adequate
philosophical analysis in this area could escape being also a sociological hypothesis,
and vice versa’.
12. As Anjum (2007: 652) points out:

The consideration of the power of political, economic and social motivation, in

Asad, is tempered with attention to the power of faith, conviction, nostalgia
or superstition . . . .Such an attention makes possible the meeting of the discipline

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440 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

of Islamology and history on the one hand, and anthropology and political econ-
omy on the other.

13. Over the last two decades, Asad has painstakingly assembled the many pieces of these
religious origins in the liberal traditions – from questions of pain, agency, memory,
violence, to the human and the secular. He has also detailed the ways in which they
have been unhinged in contemporary liberal tradition.
14. Daniel Brown (1996: 3) suggests a useful image to think about the relationship between
tradition and modernity inverting the Enlightenment conception of tradition as dark-
ness illuminated by modernity. Rather he suggests we should think about tradition as a
beam of light and modernity as a prism through which tradition is refracted. ‘A tradition
emerges from the prism of modernity as a multi-coloured spectrum of responses. Some
responses will show the effects of modernity more dramatically than others, but none
will be entirely untouched’.
15. Wahabism is the movement inspired by the 18th-century Arabian reformer Moahmmed
Ibn al Abdul Wahab who argued for an austere version of Islam.
16. Jalbani (1967) for an overview of Waliullah’s teachings.
17. A school of thought that took strands from Wahabi reformism but tempered them with
a continuous engagement with Sufism and a systematic approach to Islamic teaching.
18. Predominantly non-Wahabi ulema who also support sufi practices.
19. Mass proselytising and pietist group that is the largest grouping of Muslims today.
20. 18th-century madrassa bringing together Shia and Sunni scholarship.
21. For instance, despite Rahman’s criticism of the traditionalists he did not advocate an
abandonment of the tradition. Moreover, he remained fascinated by and interested in
resources for revival from pre-modern reform movements (Moosa, 2000: 10). As Leigh
Jenco (n.d.) has suggested for late 19th and early 20th century Chinese reformers, for
many of the Muslims modernists the contours of modernity were not sharply defined
nor had they taken an inevitable shape beyond the tradition. They did not envision
leaving the tradition behind when they incorporated specific ideas into their repertoires.
On the contrary they saw their work as expanding the tradition.
22. See, for instance, What is liberal islam? in Friday Times, a Pakistani newspaper. Available
at: http://www.thefridaytimes.com/beta2/tft/blog.php?blogstory¼4 and ‘Islamic scholar
attacks Pakistan’s blasphemy laws’ in the UK-based Guardian. Available at: http://www.
theguardian.com/world/2011/jan/20/islam-ghamidi-pakistan-blasphemy-laws. Ghamidi
claims that he is ‘neither Islamist nor secular . . .’ but ‘. . . a Muslim and a democrat’
(accessed 16 August 2016).
23. The support for traditional Islam is wide-ranging including encouragement of Sufism, as
a form of Islamic mysticism that represents a non-political interpretation of Islam.
According to the NY Times, ‘[T]he United States, meanwhile, sees Sufi Islam as a
counter force to terrorism, and has helped promote it by giving more than $1.5 million
since 2001 on the restoration and conservation of Sufi shrines in Pakistan’. Available at:
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/the-islam-that-hard-liners-hate/?_r=0
(accessed 16 August 2016).
24. Given the importance of international allies for legitimising Musharraf’s regime his
article launching ‘Enlightened Moderation’ was quite appropriately published in the
Washington Post. Musharraf P. A plea for enlightened moderation. The Washington
Post, 1 June 2004. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/
A5081-2004May31.html (accessed 23 October 2013).

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Iqtidar 441

25. Council of Islamic Ideology is a constitutional body that is tasked with ensuring that all
laws formulated by the Parliament are in accordance with Islam. Such a broad remit
brings with it relatively little power towards enforcement.
26. See Aziz (2011). However, Aziz has also argued convincingly that placing him merely as
a puppet in Musharraf’s campaign does not recognise the limits placed by the demands
of Ghamidi’s hermeneutic approach.
27. Even while in exile, Ghamidi has returned to Pakistani television screens since 2014 with
a programme ‘Ghamidi kay sath’ (With Ghamidi) recorded in Dubai with a live audience
in Karachi asking questions through a video link. Finally, in addition to his inter-
national tours to UK, USA and Australia (see his website http://www.javedahmadgha-
midi.com/) Javed Ghamidi sends out his thoughts to his international followers on
twitter and through Facebook (accessed 16 August 2016)
28. A Rand Corporation publication (Benard, 2004) lays out the following programme for
the support of traditionalists:

The West should support the traditionalists against the fundamentalists in these
ways:

. Publicise traditionalist criticism of fundamentalist violence and extremism.

. Encourage disagreements between traditionalists and fundamentalists.
. Discourage alliances between traditionalists and fundamentalists.
. Encourage cooperation between modernists and reformist traditionalists.
. Where appropriate, educate the traditionalists to debate the fundamentalists.
Fundamentalists are often rhetorically superior, while traditionalists practice a
politically inarticulate ‘‘folk Islam.’’ In places such as Central Asia, tradition-
alists may need to be trained in orthodox Islam to be able to stand their ground
against fundamentalists.
. Increase the presence and profile of modernists in traditionalist institutions.

29. One way in which this notion manifests itself is through call for a reformation in Islam.
See Mehdi Hassan’s piece for an overview of some of these calls as well as his hard
hitting response. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/
17/islam-reformation-extremism-muslim-martin-luther-europe (accessed 23 July 2016).
30. Ghamidi has a BA in English Literature from Lahore ‘s Government College and only
started his apprenticeship with Maulana Islahi in his 20s after his initial introduction to
the Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami and its founder Maududi. Initially, Ghamidi had a close
relationship with both Maududi and Islahi, but over time his pupilage with Islahi
deepened and when Islahi left JI, Ghamidi followed suit soon after.
31. (Islahi, n.d: 10) Thomas Walker Arnold later became a Professor of Islamic Studies at
SOAS from 1921 to 1930 and was one of the editors of the first edition of Brill’s
Encyclopaedia of Islam.
32. (Islahi, n.d.: 11) is not sure about the dates. His estimate for the state visit with Lord
Curzon is for 1900 but other records show that to have been 1903.
33. At a period of great enthusiasm about the possibilities of print technology among
Muslims of South Asia, Islahi’s intellectual career follows a pattern common to many
other prominent Muslim thinkers of the time. By late 19th century several key trends
had to emergence of print as a very popular medium and to a boom in religious writings.
By the 1870s editions of the Quran and other religious books were selling in tens

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442 European Journal of Political Theory 15(4)

of thousands in North India. In the same period, over 700 newspapers and magazines
were launched in Urdu, the language associated primarily with Muslims of North India
(Robinson, 1993: 67). Journalism became a career for many Islamic scholars, or ulema,
the loosely organised and broadly meritocratic group of knowledge producers in the
Islamic tradition who brought their historical and philosophical learning together with
their skills in rhetoric and writing.
34. During the 1965 presidential elections in Pakistan, Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami under
Mawdudi supported Ms Fatima Jinnah as a consensus candidate in its alliance with
leftist groups against the then military dictator Gen. Ayub (1958–1969). Islahi broke
away from JI declaring that he could not participate in this opportunistic alliance that
undermined JI’s previous acceptance of sharia interpretations against a woman leader.
35. Saleem Shahzad, a long-time associate of Ghamidi’s and translator of many of his works
in English, points out in the Translator’s note at the beginning of the English copy of
Mizan that (p.12) ‘The shariah portion of this book has been entirely cleansed of fiqh. It
is based purely on the author’s understanding of divine law’.
36. http://jang.com.pk/jang/jan2015-daily/22-01-2015/col10.htm (accessed 25 January
2016).
37. However, if we move our analysis away from his texts, and to his television appearances
Ghamidi engages with much more wide-ranging sources bringing in many different
kinds of thinkers and their arguments. In this short clip (http://admin.samaa.tv/gha-
midi-ke-saath/07-Feb-2015/ghamidi-ke-saath-07-feb-2015-samaa-tv) for instance, he
refers to Hegel and Marx to argue against political revolution while supporting at the
same time an intellectual revolution (fikri inquilab) (accessed 16 August 2016).

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